OnTap Magazine

ontapmag.co.za | Winter 2025 | 23 me doubt them entirely. Just to add to the legend, the early histo- ry of Spaten is foggy. It can be traced back as far as 1397, but the story really begins in 1807, when the brewery was bought by a man called Gabriel Sedlmeyer I. Back then, Spaten was the smallest of Munich’s 52 breweries, though Sedlmeyer was not a small name. He was a former brewmaster at Hofbrauhaus, owned by the Bavarian royal family and arguably the second-most important brewery ever (we’ll get to that in the next chapter). He turned Spaten’s for- tunes around, brewing beautiful dark beers that were cold-stored (or ‘lagered’) to be- come as delicious as any in the city. Under his ownership the lager brewery became the third largest in barely a decade, yet the most important thing he did in that time was have a son, unhelpfully also named Ga- briel Sedlmeyer (II). Gabriel Junior, as we’ll call him, was as talented as his father, albeit one of those people who talks about their gap year a bit too much. To be fair to him his gap year was more productive than most: as part of his Master Diploma in brewing, he went on a European brewery tour, of which his father resignedly said ‘Do what you like if you think you can derive something of commercial value from it.’ He visited countless countries in the early 1830s, but it was his trip to the UK with his best gap-year friend Anton Dre- her (a brewer fromAustria) that has resonat- ed through history. At that time, the UK was the world’s brew- ing powerhouse. The incredible popularity of the dark, smokey Porter beer at home, strong (or ‘Stout’) Porters in the Baltic and Russian states, and demand from around the Empire had created several of the world’s biggest breweries, mostly focused in London and Burton-on-Trent. Gabriel Ju- nior and Dreher were on a mission to find out how these beers were proving so popu- lar, and would go to any lengths to find out. One of those lengths was a hollow walking stick, with which they secretly scooped up samples to analyse back at their hotel. De- spite their beery espionage, they alsomade some great friends among the founders of the breweries they visited, many of whom were happy to share their expertise and even gifted them equipment. What Gabriel Junior and Dreher saw must have been awe inspiring; it was brew- ing on a scale they had never experienced, with technology to match. One great invention they saw was actu- ally made by an HMRC Excise officer called Benjamin Sikes, in a bid to tax these huge breweries effectively. While hydrometers, which measure the density of a liquid, had been around since the time of Ancient Greece, Sikes perfected one tomeasure the sugar in beer. This was an important inven- tion, because taking a measurement before and after fermentation allowed brewers to calculate exactly how much alcohol was in their beer. Sikes used this to tax breweries accord- ing to that alcohol level, so while the brewer might not be too pleased to have a more accurate tax bill, he would have appreci- ated the ability to know how efficient his mashes and ferments were – and thus be able to experiment with different tech- niques and temperatures to get the most out of his malt. To do that, British brewers would have used a mercury thermometer, a gadget well known in Germany at the time, but not used by Munich breweries at all. Both these inventions amazed Gabriel Ju- nior: brewing inMunich was still verymuch a qualitative endeavour – with brewers largely using ‘boiling’ and ‘not boiling yet’ as their temperature scale, and operating on a ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ basis. Gabriel Junior brought both technologies back to his fa- ther, and suddenly Spaten was producing the most consistently delicious and efficient beer in Munich. These two discoveries were overshad- owed by another the pair made on their UK roadtrip, however. Until the mid 19th cen- tury, pretty much all beer outside of the UK was a shade of dark brown, and by candle- light it was probably black. To get enough sugar from barley to brew, brewers needed to malt it, a process by which it is germinat- ed and then dried – something that was tra- ditionally done over an open fire. As anyone who’s ever cooked a sausage on a barbe- cue will know, keeping the flames low and temperature even isn’t easy, so much of the malt came out of Europe’s kilns scorched and smoky. For better or worse, both the colour and flavour of smoke were impart-